In January 2024, the influential policy maven and former Republican Party operative Oren Cass proposed a new test for conservative social policies, arguing that they should satisfy two principles: “family is good” and “supporting family means supporting working families.”11xOren Cass, “Passing a Test on Family Policy,” American Compass, January 31, 2024; https://americancompass.org/passing-a-test-on-family-policy/. Just four years earlier, Cass founded American Compass, a Washington, DC, think tank devoted to challenging the free-market, libertarian hegemony to which elements of both the right and left subscribe. Opposing that neoliberal consensus, American Compass advanced a new brand of conservatism, often called national conservatism, which envisions a politics aimed at affirming a common morality derived from national tradition. In pursuit of that vision, American Compass calls for an active state to shape an economy reflecting the “importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity.”22xHenry Olsen, “This New Think Tank Wants to Reform Conservatism. Republicans Ignore It at Their Peril,” Washington Post, May 5, 2020, quoting the American Compass mission statement.
The occasion for Cass’s test was the response of the Wall Street Journal to a bipartisan bill that expanded the Child Tax Credit. The paper’s editorial board had called the bill an unwarranted handout to taxpayers, comparing the Child Tax Credit to a subsidy for buying a Tesla. The editors worried that the bill, if adopted, would discourage work and economic growth.33xEditorial Board, “Tax Credit Bidding War,” Wall Street Journal, October 31, 2017. Cass countered that such arguments were absurd. Government has a responsibility to promote childbearing and child rearing, he argued, and “support for working families” was not the same thing as “unconditional cash payments.” Cass admonished conservatives to reject “decades of WSJ-style economic policy.” They should look ahead to 2025, when, he predicted, family policy would assume heightened political importance.44xCass, “Passing a Test on Family Policy.”
Cass’s warning was prescient. And it was heeded just as much by liberals and progressives as by conservatives. In the 2024 election, shared grievances about the plight of working families under neoliberalism spanned the political spectrum. Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris tried to own the issue by emphasizing the Democratic Party’s historic ties to labor, her own biography as the daughter of a single working mother, and pro-family policies such as insurance coverage for IVF. Donald Trump, however, was able to control the working families discourse by linking it to related cultural tropes: a blustering, misogynist masculinity, gun rights, Christianity, “law and order,” and rugged rural values. Trump further solidified his connection to a specific variant of pro-family politics by selecting Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate. Claiming to be a postliberal Catholic, Vance professes belief in the natural status of families, prior to the state, and in the elevation of community over individual rights.55xJonathan Liedl, “JD Vance Is a Catholic ‘Post-Liberal’: Here’s What That Means—and Why It Matters,” National Catholic Register, July 24, 2024; https://www.ncregister.com/news/j-d-vance-is-a-catholic-post-liberal.
Far beyond rhetoric, family policy is at the heart of an intense debate about the future of any plausible post-neoliberal governance. Precipitated in part by the crisis of care experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the political discontent with neoliberal family policy has reached a fever pitch. Competing alternatives of family support have emerged. The political right and left share the belief that the past half century’s intensification of private responsibility for social reproduction—the labor and resources necessary to sustain life and reproduce the next generation—has proven disastrous. But they offer dramatically different agendas based on which working families they believe government should support and what forms that support should take.
The Plight of Working Families in Neoliberal America
To understand both Cass’s grievance and his vision, we need to consider the broad contours of US family policy going back at least fifty years. On December 9, 1971, President Richard Nixon vetoed legislation that came tantalizingly close to establishing universal childcare in the United States. The Comprehensive Child Development Act (CCDA) would have provided federal funding for community-based childcare, offering free services below a specified income cutoff and services on a sliding scale thereafter. Although a broad coalition of anti-poverty liberals, welfare reformers, child-development experts, and women’s liberation and civil rights activists supported the CCDA, it alarmed an emergent New Right. This coalition of anti-communists, market fundamentalists, and social conservatives saw serious dangers in government-sponsored childcare for middle-class families. As they understood it, such a program would lead to the racial integration of young children, fund militant organizing efforts in African American communities, discourage maternal care as the family norm, and substitute bureaucratic dictates for parental authority while intruding on the privacy of the family. New Right activists warned that the CCDA would put “government in place of the parent” and push American families toward Soviet-style authoritarianism.66xDeborah Dinner, “The Universal Childcare Debate: Rights Mobilization, Social Policy, and the Dynamics of Feminist Activism, 1966–1974,” Law and History Review 28, no. 3 (2010). Their sympathizers within the administration, including Vice President Spiro Agnew and speechwriter Patrick Buchanan, successfully pushed Nixon to veto the new act.77xKimberly J. Morgan, “A Child of the Sixties: The Great Society, the New Right, and the Politics of Federal Child Care,” Journal of Policy History 13 (2001): 215–250; https://doi.org/10.1353/jph.2001.0005.
The very next day, however, Nixon signed a law that expanded the childcare expense tax deduction. Unable to ignore that paid work by mothers had increased eightfold between 1945 and 1969 and that women comprised 40 percent of the US workforce, Nixon had, in these two successive actions, entrenched the bifurcation of childcare policy into public, government-funded childcare for the poor, and privatized, commercial daycare for the middle class. Childcare policy thereby accommodated the growth in mothers’ labor-market participation while protecting the ideal of family autonomy and private child rearing. This policy framework, which simultaneously promoted the feminization of the workforce in a postindustrial economy and preserved crucial elements of traditional gender ideology, characterized neoliberal family policy emergent in the 1970s.
Neoliberal family policy replaced the New Deal social contract premised on the family-wage ideal. Both government and business had earlier pledged to maintain a hybrid, public-private welfare regime that distributed benefits to male breadwinners and their families. The New Deal equilibrium between labor and capital thus reflected and reinforced gender ideologies, which were rooted in nineteenth-century industrialization and which flourished in the domesticity fostered by the Cold War politics of the late 1940s and 1950s.88xFor discussion of the emergence of separate-spheres gender ideologies and the devaluation of women’s unpaid labor over the course of nineteenth-century industrialization, see Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1990); Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press/Veritas, 2020). For an account of the relationship between American family life and Cold War politics, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1988). For histories that show that Cold War domesticity was far from uniform, see Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994). Yet the New Deal compact faced internal limitations and external opposition. To start, a Faustian bargain with Southern Democrats had resulted in legislation, including the Fair Labor Standards Act and National Labor Relations Act, that excluded the vast majority of African American workers.99xOn the racial hierarchies created by New Deal legislation, see Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2013). The civil rights movement of the post–World War II era was, in part, a push for inclusion and equity within the New Deal’s public-private welfare regime. In addition, from the outside, business groups, employers, and free-market fundamentalists were organizing an intellectual and legal assault on New Deal economic regulation, from the incubator of neoliberal thought in the Mont Pèlerin Society to assorted right-to-work campaigns.1010xThe historical literature on this assault is vast. For a sampling of works, see Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Sophia Z. Lee, The Workplace Constitution From the New Deal to the New Right (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Religious and other social conservatives opposed what they viewed as a government leviathan threatening both liberty and community.
Such challenges to the New Deal met with various responses. One came from Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who in 1965 wrote a report so influential and controversial that it would come to be known by his name. Moynihan described black family life as a “tangle of pathology” and attributed poverty among African Americans to “matriarchal” family structures.1111xDaniel Patrick Moynihan, principal author, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Office of Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor, March 1965; https://www.dol.gov/general/aboutdol/history/webid-moynihan. Moynihan was at the forefront of a coalition of anti-poverty activists, social scientists, and government reformers leading what historian Robert Self called “breadwinner liberalism.”1212xRobert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2012). These advocates sought to bring black and poor families within the ambit of the New Deal’s affirmative freedoms by expanding government programs that supported men in their roles as family providers. Their philosophy of individual opportunity and family economic security through male breadwinning underpinned many of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society initiatives, including employment-discrimination laws, manpower training, student loans, and Medicaid.
Feminists offered an alternative vision. Instead of employment laws and family policies that supported male breadwinners, they fought for family supports that would challenge traditional gender ideologies. More specifically, they advocated for policies that recognized the economic value of women’s unpaid care work within families as well as for policies that promoted women’s equity in the labor market. They tried to channel the energies of the Great Society to craft employment laws and family policies that were both robust and egalitarian. Along with women’s rights leaders such as Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and Betty Friedan, as well as radical feminists such as Ti-Grace Atkinson and Shulamith Firestone, activists within the labor movement were particularly important to the feminist movement. For example, Caroline Davis of the United Auto Workers and Myra Wolfgang of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union fought both to enforce employment-discrimination laws and win enhanced protections for workers. As associate general counsel of the International Union of Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, Ruth Weyand helped lead a campaign for the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which outlawed widespread discriminatory practices such as not hiring women on the grounds of actual or likely pregnancy, firing pregnant workers, and excluding pregnancy-related benefits from state- and employer-based health and disability insurance. Administrative employees at Cornell University began to organize against the maltreatment of female workers in 1975, a few years before Catharine MacKinnon published her landmark book Sexual Harassment of Working Women. These various efforts secured individual rights to opportunity, opposed sex-role stereotyping, and enabled women to chart their own paths in life.1313xSee, for example, Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Katherine Turk, Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
Feminist activists fought for more than opportunity, however. They also sought to win new government entitlements that would both support care and challenge traditional gender roles. Universal childcare was one of feminists’ most important goals. The call for federally funded, community-controlled free childcare echoed across the women’s movement in the late 1960s, with the more liberal leaders emphasizing its importance to women’s workforce and civic participation and the more radical activists championing it primarily to dismantle patriarchal family structures. The CCDA would have approximated the feminist vision—a reality that motivated New Right opposition to the legislation.
Other goals derived from the international socialist feminist movement Wages for Housework, which challenged the exploitation of women’s unpaid caregiving labor within families that subsidized capitalism. In the United States, this ideology underpinned women’s rights advocacy, including that of the National Organization for Women, for entitlements that would mitigate the economic vulnerability of so-called homemakers. Although the prototypical homemaker was a middle-class, married white woman, for whom the risk of divorce or widowhood threatened economic insecurity, some feminists used the term more expansively. Activist Margaret Prescod founded Black Women for Wages for Housework and advocated, at the 1977 Houston Women’s Conference, for a platform that promised economic support for homemakers outside of marriage, including single mothers, lesbians, and others who defied conventional gender classifications.1414xDinner, “The Universal Childcare Debate.”
During the 1970s and 1980s and beyond, gay and lesbian rights activists similarly fought for both antidiscrimination and public benefits. They organized for rights both to employment opportunity and to the free expression of queer identities in the workplace. They fought for constitutional rights to sexual privacy as well as marriage equality. At the same time, they pushed for equity in child custody, private insurance coverage, and public benefits to support the creation and protection of non-marital families. In the late twentieth century, social movements for liberation and equality fought for changes in employment law, family law, and health and social policy that would reorder the relationships between individual men and women, families, and citizenship.1515xFor a sampling of recent leading works, see Margot Canaday, Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023); Marie-Amélie George, Family Matters: Queer Households and the Half-Century Struggle for Legal Recognition (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2024); Jack Lowery, It was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic (New York, NY: Bold Type Books, 2022).
The New Right, in response, mobilized to defeat the aims of the feminist and gay liberation movements. Employers and business trade associations opposed labor feminists’ efforts to achieve universal labor protections for male and female workers alike, while persuading courts to hollow out sex-discrimination statutes. Legal doctrine advanced formal equality, integrating women into workplaces modeled on white male industrial workers. At the same time, courts shut down doctrinal interpretations, such as comparable worth and expansive concepts of disparate-impact liability, which would have done more to transform workplace structures in ways hospitable to working parents.
Meanwhile, social conservatives such as Phyllis Schlafly opposed feminist efforts to win welfare-state entitlements, including universal childcare and Social Security credits for homemakers, because of the threat they posed to traditional family norms. They then used the thinner political definitions of gender equality that emerged—formal nondiscrimination in the absence of welfare supports for families and care—to oppose further feminist activism. By the mid-1990s, out of political necessity, Democrats adopted some of the right’s critique of the welfare state. President Bill Clinton signed two pieces of legislation that exemplified these trends: The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 made it easier for women and men experiencing familial crises to keep their jobs and also affirmed private familial care, sex neutrality under law, and class-stratified employment benefits. Welfare reform in 1996 cut back on assistance and imposed work obligations on single mothers. Thus, the Democratic Party embraced neoliberal family policy, which promoted a low-wage female labor force, affirmed formal sex equality under law, reduced social service bureaucracy, and reinforced the cultural primacy of marriage and private familial care.
Neoliberal family policy, however, left families struggling. As dual-earner and single-parent families became the norm, parents turned to commodified forms of childcare and patchwork arrangements for kin- and community-based care. Yet the market repeatedly proved incapable of providing affordable, quality care at a level meeting anything close to demand. As shifts toward a service economy and the decline of the family wage drew increasing numbers of middle-class women into the workforce, laws and policies failed either to transform the nature of work or to support new forms of care. By the twenty-first century, families were experiencing a crisis of care.
The COVID-19 pandemic intensified this crisis and made it front-page news, with stories about harried parents juggling their laptops on one knee and their young children on the other.1616xDeborah Dinner, “The Care Crisis: COVID-19, Labor Feminism, and Democracy,” The Cambridge Handbook of Labor and Democracy, Angela B. Cornell and Mark Barenberg eds., (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 217–234. Paid care workers—mostly female and low-income workers of color—were designated “essential.” Black and Latina workers were at once disproportionately exposed to health risks and more likely to be pushed out of the workplace when businesses shut down.1717xCatherine Powell, “Color of COVID: The Racial Justice Paradox of Our New Stay-at-Home Economy,” CNN; https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/10/opinions/covid-19-people-of-color-labor-market-disparities-powell/index.html. More than 2.3 million women, compared to 1.8 million men, dropped out of the labor force between February 2020 and February 2021, and many argued that the pandemic sounded a death knell for feminism.1818xFor employment statistics, see National Women’s Law Center, A Year of Strength & Loss: The Pandemic, The Economy & the Value of Women’s Work, March 2021; https://nwlc.org/resource/the-pandemic-the-economy-the-value-of-womens-work/. In this context, the political right began to call for a new brand of conservatism, with a nationalist and often fundamentalist Christian family policy at its core.
National Conservative Family Policy
As one of the architects of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Cass now has the chance to implement his “family test.” Although Trump disavowed the controversial blueprint during his electoral campaign, he plans to populate his cabinet with people closely tied to it. The first goal outlined in Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (also known as Project 2025) is to “restore the family.”1919xKevin D. Roberts, “Foreword: A Promise to America,” Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Heritage Foundation), 3; https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf. Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts, writes in the foreword: “It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority….”2020xIbid. In contrast to neoliberals who affirm private choice and economic responsibility when it comes to family matters, national conservatives such as Cass, Roberts, political theorist Patrick Deneen, and Senator Josh Hawley want to exercise government power to support family making—pregnancy and childbirth, child rearing, and familial care work.
Unlike the breadwinner liberals of the 1960s, however, they want to tear apart, rather than to extend, the New Deal compact. They see the dismantling of the administrative state as critical to a political realignment that draws the white working class to the Republican Party. Beyond this tactical consideration, national conservatives are opposed to government bureaucracy because they believe it has weakened family, church, and volunteer organizations—and thereby stifled the moral virtues that these institutions advance. National conservatism’s opposition to the New Deal comes in part from religious convictions; many in the movement explicitly connect their understanding of moral tradition to what they term the “Judeo-Christian” tradition, and much of the energy behind this movement comes from the fundamentalist-Christian wing of the Republican Party. Not all adherents are Christian or even religious, however, and many simply align themselves with a Burkean tradition opposed to democratic liberalism.2121xBrad Littlejohn, “National Conservatism, Then and Now,” National Affairs (Summer 2023); https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/national-conservatism-then-and-now.
The defining feature of the national-conservatism vision for government support of families is its gender illiberalism, often deriving from fundamentalist religious beliefs. According to Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.”2222xRoberts, “Foreword: A Promise to America.” Severino argues that the father should reign as household head—in all his “biological and sociological” specificity, not as a “gender neutral parent.”2323xRoger Severino, “Department of Health and Human Services,” Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Heritage Foundation), 482; https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf. The conservatives behind Project 2025 believe in the use of government power to reinstate this father to his rightful place.
Some proposals are for the exercise of soft power, such as marriage promotion by the Department of Health and Human Services. Project 2025 identifies a “crisis of fatherlessness” as the reason for a host of social ills: sexual abuse, poor youth educational outcomes, and incarceration, among others.2424xSeverino, “Department of Health and Human Services,” 451. Although conservatives’ vision of family is formally race neutral, it celebrates an ideal historically most available to white, middle-class families. Roberts and Severino both emphasize that 70 percent of black children are born to unmarried mothers.2525xRoberts, “Foreword: A Promise to America,” 4; Severino, “Department of Health and Human Services.” Severino does not mention the statistic, but he does write, “Child support in the United States should strengthen marriage as the norm, restore broken homes, and encourage unmarried couples to commit to marriage.” Advocates of national conservatism’s family policy thus recall the Moynihan report in their emphasis on cultural explanation for racial inequality. Yet they simultaneously eschew the government social insurance, welfare entitlements, and service programs that liberals have long advocated to expand family security.
Although the right has broadly accepted women’s rights to work, it yearns for a return of the family wage and uses state power to impose motherhood. Project 2025 urges attention to the “real” causes of the gender wage gap—implying the private choices of mothers to prioritize care in the home and of fathers to prioritize higher-paid work. At the same time, the Project calls for an end to the disparate impact theory of liability that makes it possible to challenge the workplace policies and practices that channel working mothers into lower-paying jobs. The promotion of government support for at-home childcare, coupled with an assault on antidiscrimination law, suggests that national-conservatism family policy aims to restore maternal care in the home.
Childcare provides a striking example of how opposition to government bureaucracy, traditional gender ideologies, and the federal tax power intersect in national conservatism’s family policy. In 2021, then Senator Vance tweeted, “‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people.” Using arguably questionable evidence, he pointed to a chart by American Compass showing that parents with four-year college degrees were two times more likely to support full-time paid childcare than were those with less than a college education.2626x@JD Vance, Twitter, April 29, 2021. Project 2025 proposes to eliminate Head Start—one of the more successful and broadly popular legacies of the Great Society.2727xSeverino, “Department of Health and Human Services,” 482. As leading figures of the national conservatism movement see it, government-sponsored childcare stands for elitism rather than populism (even though it would help the working and middle classes economically), non-traditional gender roles, and the threat of administrative authority to parental authority and family privacy.
In lieu of universal daycare, national conservatives want to facilitate parental (read, maternal) care at home through revisions of the tax code. Although Vance skipped a vote to expand the Child Tax Credit, conservatives in the past few years have advocated similar such legislation. Senators Marco Rubio and Mike Lee proposed an expansion of tax credits to help cover the cost of commercial daycare. Senator Josh Hawley has advanced a plan that conforms better with nationalist and conservative Christian values. He proposed legislation to create a “parent tax credit”: a fully refundable credit that would pay parents to care for children under age thirteen, offering married couples double the credit awarded to single parents.2828xCaroline Downey, “Hawley to Introduce $12K Tax Credit Bill,” National Review, April 26, 2021, https://www.nationalreview.com/news/hawley-to-introduce-12k-child-tax-credit-bill/; Joseph Zeballos-Roig, “Sen. Josh Hawley Wants to Send $1,000 Monthly Checks to Families With Kids Under 13 But Provide Less to Single Parents,” Business Insider, April 26, 2021, https://www.businessinsider.com/josh-hawley-child-tax-credit-monthly-checks-families-kids-2021–24.
National conservatism’s commitment to restoring patriarchy is also where hard power comes into play. Plans to end abortion access should be understood as part of the new conservative family policy. It serves twin goals of the religious right: protecting unborn life and coercing women into a biologically essentialist version of motherhood. The highest hope of religious conservatives is a national abortion ban. Yet they also set their sights on more incremental aims that, with Trump’s election, are realistic. They plan to pressure the FDA to withdraw its approval of misoprostol and to use the Comstock Act to stop the distribution of chemical abortion pills via postal mail. They seek to restrict abortion services for military service members and veterans, and to withdraw federal funding to organizations, such as Planned Parenthood, that provide abortions, even when these funds are used for non-abortion health-care services. They intend to interpret federal employment discrimination and pension laws in ways that limit employer-sponsored abortion benefits.2929xRoberts, “Foreword: A Promise to America,” 6; Severino, “Department of Health and Human Services,” 459, 471–472; Jonathan Berry, “Department of Labor and Related Agencies,” Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, 585.
National conservatives, however, situate their anti-abortion agenda within a broader commitment to family making. They aver support for strong enforcement of laws, including the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, and Americans with Disabilities Act, meant to help pregnant women maintain workforce participation. This ideological commitment to support for pregnant workers recalls an earlier strain of the anti-abortion movement. In the 1970s, some pro-welfare Catholics, such as the prominent bioethicist André Hellegers, and the majority-Protestant American Citizens Concerned for Life advocated welfare supports for pregnant women, including worker rights. Pregnancy-based protections affirmed their religious values by treating childbearing as a collective social responsibility rather than merely a private choice. They further believed that such protections would have the practical effect of encouraging women to bring their pregnancies to term. In the 1980s, however, as a coalition between religious conservatives and market fundamentalists solidified, the National Right to Life Committee sidelined a broader “pro-life” agenda. One might question the sincerity of national conservatives’ return to this agenda, given their stated aspirations to push the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to “disclaim its regulatory pretensions.”3030xBerry, “Department of Labor and Related Agencies,” 586. Yet Christian conservatives more widely pledge to support pregnant women and mothers through privatized forms of care, such as crisis pregnancy centers, rather than government-sponsored social welfare.
Although national conservatives make limited concessions to gender liberalism in recognition of the role that female workers play in the nation’s postindustrial political economy, they seek to turn back the clock on liberal and progressive interpretations of sexual freedom, gender identity, and trans equality. They pledge support for “homemakers,” but by this they mean that social policy should enable women’s return to traditional care roles within marital families (implicitly, via the economic support of wage-earning men). National conservatism thus rejects feminist and gay liberation interpretations of such support to mean direct government valuation of care work and workers themselves, as well as support for caregiving within the context of LGBTQ+ families.3131xIvana Greco, “Supporting American Homemakers,” American Compass, Rebuilding American Capitalism: A Handbook for Conservative Policymakers (2023): 77–78; https://americancompass.org/rebuilding-american-capitalism/supportive-communities/supporting-american-homemakers/. Project 2025 commits to excising both “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” from public school curricula across the nation (notwithstanding the report’s advocacy of parental control). From the conservative perspective, liberals are hypocritical: They teach that skin color is determinative of social status and, at the same time, “deny…the givenness of our nature as men or women.”3232xRoberts, “Foreword: A Promise to America,” 5. How can race be real and gender not, after all? Of course, from the liberal perspective, there is no paradox. Race is a sociological construct that takes on material reality in the context of historical and still-existing oppression. Gender identity is individual and fluid rather than biologically fixed. Yet conservatives preach the inverse: colorblindness and gender essentialism. This formulation serves a particular policy agenda—one that eliminates affirmative action in the name of individual merit and allows for the use of public power to assert the normative primacy of heterosexual, cisgender family making.
National conservatives aim to use government power to discriminate against LGBTQ+ individuals and families. They plan to delete reference to sexual orientation and gender identity from every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, and piece of legislation. They want to remove nondiscrimination conditions for federal grants to adoption agencies and to allow federal agencies to withhold funds from K–12 schools, colleges, and universities that refuse to limit the interpretation of Title IX to “sex” and not sexual orientation and gender identity. This, too, is muscular family policy, which subordinates gay and lesbian, queer, and trans individuals and families who do not conform.
The Future of Family Policy: Rupture or Continuity?
Neoliberal family policy is in political jeopardy. What will replace it—if any real change comes—remains up for grabs. Some elements of the Democratic Party have revived the historic aspirations of the feminist and gay liberation movements for social democratic family policy, at once robust and egalitarian. Meanwhile, national conservatism advances a patriarchal family policy that won popular endorsement in the recent elections. Yet, while bearing the veneer of political rupture, such policy carries forward core neoliberal tenets.
Social democratic family policy exists as a hope at the edges of the liberal and progressive coalition. For example, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign in 2020 included a universal childcare proposal that included policies originally found in the CCDA. The most ambitious progressive activists, such as Ai-Jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and director of Caring Across Generations, advocate universal family care—a social insurance program that would fund paid family and medical leave. The West Virginia and Oklahoma teacher strikes of 2018 that mobilized the strikers’ identities as care workers, and the more recent organizing campaigns of autoworkers, Starbucks baristas, and Boeing employees demanding a fair share in their employers’ wealth, envision societal support for all families. But such calls have not yet found their way to political power.
Indeed, in the past several years, the Democratic Party has managed to secure only anemic support for working families. When push came to shove, President Joe Biden was unable to win more than physical infrastructure within his signature legislative achievement—the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The Build Back Better Act included some of Biden’s plans for social infrastructure, allocating funding for health care and the mitigation of climate change. But it excluded social safety net proposals of the kind advocated by Warren and Poo, and even still could not overcome political opposition. The inability of Democrats to fashion their own coherent working families agenda undoubtedly contributed to their triple loss in the 2024 election. One of the more important lessons of the late twentieth century is that the neoliberal regime, entailing thin interpretation of antidiscrimination law coupled with a paucity of support for family well-being and care work, fails to meet people’s needs. For this reason, the continuation of policy in this vein will also fail to stave off further political realignment.
National conservatives are more likely to succeed in institutionalizing their family policy than progressive social democrats precisely because they promise the restoration of older, better days. Even if the family wage never truly existed as it was imagined by workers and policymakers, and even if there were always dissenters from the norms of the white, heterosexual nuclear family, nostalgia for these cultural ideals has proved to be a potent siren call in our national politics.
In addition, the family policy of national conservatism may succeed precisely by offering greater continuity with, rather than a departure from, the policies associated with neoliberalism. National conservatives are certainly more market oriented than they admit, and neoliberals have been more socially conservative than they pretend. For all their affirmation of the need for government support for the family, national conservatives hope to channel such support largely through the tax code. Doing so, they preserve the neoliberal value of family privacy and choice. Neoliberals themselves have long preferred to use credits over universal government entitlements because the former do not show up on the account books as a form of government spending. Tax credits are politically consistent with efforts to streamline government. Furthermore, recent historical scholarship debunks the idea that neoliberals eschew government. Rather, they put muscular government to specific ends. The neoliberal coalition embraced “family values” precisely because doing so comported with their goal of increasing private responsibility for social welfare.3333xMelinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2017). Neoliberals did not shrink the state so much as refashion it. And for their part, national conservatives continue to embrace private over public forms of care work and class-stratified social-welfare provisioning. In the end, we may question just how “post” the post-neoliberalism of national conservatism really is.